Presently sponsored by: Varonis. Reduce your ransomware blast radius with the leader in data-first security. Try it free!

I was having a coffee with a good mate the other day. He's not a techie (he runs a pizza restaurant), but somehow, we ended up talking about passwords. Because he's a normal person, he has the same 1 or 2 or 3 he uses everywhere and even without telling me what they were, I knew they were terrible. Actually, I'll rephrase that: because he was a normal guy; he's not normal anymore because yesterday I carved out some time to give him an early Christmas present:

Today I spent an hour getting a mate into @1Password. I bought him a year's worth at $4.99 per month for him, his wife and 3 kids and within an hour, had him going across devices and enabling 2FA on his things. Make this your Xmas present when you visit friends and family 😎

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 6, 2021

This tweet got a heap of love with many people chiming in about what a good idea it is to use the Christmas period to transform the security posture of our loved ones. So, a few hours after tweeting this I pinged the folks at 1Password:

Me: Hey, people love this idea, what can we do?

1Password: Here's a link to get 50% off for the next 1,000 people that sign up for a families subscription.

Well that was easy 🙂 Also, where were you guys a few hours ago when I shelled out for a year at full price?! Not upset, that was still a great value Christmas present, but this is, well, literally twice as great value! All you need to do is follow this link:

Yes, I'd like to be a good daughter / son / niece / nephew / grand-daughter / grand-son / cousin / next door neighbour / mate / well-wisher / whatever and give someone a 1Password subscription at 50% off and help them learn how to use it!

That last point is really important: had I not spent that hour with my mate, he would have had to find his own way through a tool he'd never seen before then attempt to change life-long practices all in one go. Just to make it really easy for anyone who wants to take up this offer and help get a mate up and running, here's the basics of what we did:

1. I explained the importance of password uniqueness and how your brain will never allow you to achieve this across all the services you use
2. We signed him for an account on the website and added his family members as part of the process (remember, use the link above for the 50% off!)
3. He created a master password he hadn't used anywhere before
4. We printed the Emergency Kit and wrote his master password on it by hand (it'll now go into a safe)
5. We turned on 2FA (he had an existing soft token authenticator)
6. He installed the client on his Mac (including the browser extension) and then on his iPhone
7. We took a very small handful of accounts and went through the following process:
   a. Login and have 1Password store the credentials
   b. Change the password to one 1Password automatically generates
   c. Turn on 2FA and store the token in 1Password

And that was it. Obviously, he still has a heap of accounts to set decent passwords on, but now he knows the pattern and he can repeat that over and over again. Starting with the most important services makes sense (email, banking, social media) and then helping his own family members will be a breeze after that.

What I really enjoyed about this process was watching how painful it was for him to type in banking info manually (account number then password) compared to how fast it was once 1Password just started auto-filling it for him. And speaking of banking info, remember that 1Password isn't just about storing passwords, I put credit cards in there too so they can easily be auto-filled into websites on check-out. In fact, there's a whole heap of different classes of "secrets" you can store (screen cap from the latest v8 for Windows):

Most people reading this are techie enough to easily get their loved ones up and running in an hour and I genuinely reckon that's one of the best Christmas presents you can give them. Per the title, this is a gift that will keep on giving for the long term as it permanently changes people's behaviour. And now it's cheaper than ever 🙂

For full disclosure, I'm on 1Password'sBoard of Advisors. The link for 50% off is not a referral link and other than giving me warm fuzzies, I get nothing from people signing up via it. Also, I only get the aforementioned warm fuzzies if people let me know they've actually helped out a mate so please comment here or tweet me if you take this up, I'd love to know it's helped people.